Wednesday, January 28, 2004

"'Last fall, Commissioner Yecke received a letter from Congress stressing that this guidance in the No Child Left Behind Act Conference Report was the official position of Congress on science education. The letter was signed by Minnesota Congressman John Kline and Congressman John Boehner, chairman of the U.S. House Education and the Workforce Committee.'

You would never guess from this passage that the wording about evolution was cut out of the act before it became a bill. It is not Congress's official position.

Finally, the press release ends by urging Minnesota to 'teach the controversy.' The Discovery Institute would like to pretend that their specious claims are actually part of a scientific controversy. If that were true, then you'd expect them publishing new findings in Cell or The Journal of Biochemistry, and being invited to give talks at major scientific venues like the Federation of American Societies of Experimental Biology. Instead, they whine with their bogus claims of censorship. Having been unable to make a dent in the scientific arena, they create a political controversy, through which they hope to get from high schools what they can't get from real science: credibility."

The combination of our convoluted immigration laws and Homeland Security is a classic case of Calvinball. It's produced needless tragedies. It makes it look like our country is run by a bunch of idiots. Duh!

Timothy Noah:
"The word 'conservation' appeared once in a plea to pass the energy bill, which takes various steps to encourage more oil drilling. This in a speech where Bush found time to call for an end to steroid abuse in professional sports, an issue completely outside the realm of government at the federal, state, or local level. Apparently Karl Rove has decided that the environment isn't even worth paying lip service to anymore."

Sunday, January 18, 2004

By Bill McKibben:
"Dean's a good guy. Not the second coming, not Martin Luther King, not Abraham Lincoln, but a good guy. In Vermont, every kid in the state had access to good health care by the time he was done. That shouldn't be such an accomplishment, but in our America it is. Environmentally, he did straightforward, sound things: conserved a lot of land, made real efforts on energy conservation. Budgets were balanced, but not on the backs of poor people. And his plans for the nation seem sound too. Like most of his Democratic rivals, he could be expected to at least do all the obvious things, and some of the not-so-obvious."

Saturday, January 17, 2004

Wouldn't be wild if various intelligence agencies had spooks in such deep cover in the Islamic terrorist organizations that in order to confirm their own bona fides they needed to make runs at at least planning some attacks and these efforts are what is generating the chatter that has set off the Home Security alarms? Pogo would have struck again. "We have met the enemy and he is us."

from Arianna:
"Struggling to reconcile the ever-widening gulf between what the Bush administration claims to be true and what is actually true is getting harder by the day. Scientists at M.I.T. have apparently been having some success using string theory and particle accelerators, but where does that leave the rest of us? Fortunately, Paul O'Neill has a timely, if disturbing, diagnosis, backed up by some 19,000 pages of lab results: The White House is being run by a band of out-and-out fanatics."

Ancient DNA Mutations:When heat and cold are managed by technology, not metabolism, and people from warmer climates are eating the high fat and calorie diets of northern climates, there is a rise in obesity and the age-related degenerative diseases,' Wallace said. 'The caloric intake and local climate of many individuals are out of balance with their genetic history. Thus, our genetic history is linked to our current diseases, resulting in the new field of evolutionary medicine.

Sunday, January 11, 2004

link:
"So, what does O'Neill reveal? According to the book, ideology and electoral politics so dominated the domestic-policy process during his tenure that it was often impossible to have a rational exchange of ideas. The incurious President was so opaque on some important issues that top Cabinet officials were left guessing his mind even after face-to-face meetings. Cheney is portrayed as an unstoppable force, unbowed by inconvenient facts as he drives Administration policy toward his goals."

"The International Monetary Fund, which usually frets about runaway fiscal policies in developing countries, yesterday released a report that warned of the dangers to the global economy posed by the United States' lack of spending discipline, its reliance on foreign creditors, and its failure to plan adequately for future government liabilities."

"An unprecedently intrusive and well-funded search by the US since the fall of Baghdad has found little more than UN inspectors did before the war. The Carnegie report says continued 'coercive' UN inspections, a tactic it has long advocated, would have eventually verified this without war"

This Mad Cow incident may not be so bad in the long run. It appears that the safeguards currently is placed worked well enough to catch the problem before meat actually became a risk. But more importantly the scare may result in the meat industry actually cleaning up its act.

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The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled.--Plutarch

I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it.-- John Stuart Mill

We should do everything we can to make sure this country lives up to our children's expectations.--Barack Obama

cogito ergo sum. -- Descartes

Concerning prayer-I would imagine somebody in back was taking care of that for me while I was flying the airplane.--Captain Chesley Sullenberger

Countless lives were saved when I decided not to become a nurse. --Mildred Walton

The secret to a long marriage is to take care of your health.--Mildred Walton